Yeah same. Both things are true and if we’re being honest, one more than the other.
The grid is ailing, but it is data centers pushing it over the edge. A newer and more robust grid wouldn’t be hurt by them. But without them the grid wouldn’t be failing. Be honest and draw the correct causal relationship.
Yep - this is the same BS marketing campaign the Chevron tried to (succeeded actually) pull of in the early 2000's WRT global warming. There's was energy. The campaigns were like "I will take the bus to work" or "I will use my hair drier less".
It's a deflection campaign - focusing consumer attention on a thing that is true (that won't cost them money) to divert attention from another thing that is true (that will cost them money and is their fault).
Both are true - and if they want to exploit a commons (the environment, the electrical grid), then they should pay for that exploit.
I red 1984 and "Brave new world" roughly at the same time, and for quite some time I thought 1984 to be too unrealistic, and I considered bnw as more likely scenario.
I was wrong.
I remember having a similar feeling about 'A Handmaids Tale', a TV show I gave up watching because I would actually weep myself to sleep.
Coming soon no doubt. It's like they are determined to make dystopian nightmares a reality, almost as if they know the end is nigh or this particular iteration of civilization is drawing to a close and they are determined to squeeze the very soul out of the experience.
absolutely, however this doesn’t mean we should abandon local. i can’t remember who, but someone in the ai nuts and bolts arena said “smaller local models is where the exciting stuff is happening right now. it’s the area real fast progression is happening.” and it seems to be true. new big models aren’t making near the leaps smaller models are.
it’s so important we keep moving forward on running locally for the same reason it was important for us to use open standards when building the internet. if we hadn’t we’d all be connected through aol with 10 hours/month allowed internet usage and termed in through a sun workstation renting cpu cycles from some mainframe company at like “you’ve got 10,000 cpu cycles left on your monthly plan, please deposit $500 for 5,000 more.”
while all of this this is before my time, i’ve heard and read so many horror stories about how people could only connect through dumb terminals to “you wouldn’t believe it, computers then were the size of buildings” 1000 miles away and had to sign up for workload timeslots. make no mistake, this is the future these companies want, they want us to rent everything and own nothing.
Local is enough for most users as long as they're willing to accept a non-realtime response - which is a real limitation (especially for personal agentic use) but not a very significant one. The hardware is not that expensive, a single user's needs aren't going to saturate a state-of-the art AI datacenter rack or anything like that. Not even for heavy agentic workloads.
You rent your broadband internet. It's not a foreign concept that we can't own all the infra.
I don't know why we can't just get over the local compute thing and instead build open infra and models in the cloud. That's literally the only way we'll be able to keep pace with hyperscalers.
Local is not going to benefit 99% of use cases. It's a silly toy.
If we build open infra for cloud-based provisioning and inference, we could build a future we still have some ownership in. We'd be able to fine tune large models for lots of purposes. We wouldn't be locked in to major vendors.
i personally think we need to work towards both open weights in the cloud and local.
use the experience we gain from both to bolster the other.
a future where we are unable to locally run is kind of troubling. as is a future with no open cloud. we need both to stop some of the horrors the hyperscalers will happily inflict.
it’s crazy to me how many times throughout the years these guy have done things which were just awful awful for their users.
then they follow it up with a media blitz “oh, look at how amazing we are, we’re going to work on local accounts”
do awful shit then expect praise when they undo 30% of it.
the guys on a podcast i listen to said it best, (these guys have typically always recommended windows so it held some weight when they discussed this):
> “when i’m on windows it feels like im constantly under attack. whether it’s constant nags for edge, onedrive, online accounts, settings i’ve previously changed turning themselves back on again, recall, copilot, settings buried in registry, etc… only for microsoft to undo them on the next update. i’m constantly on defensive. but with linux i just don’t feel like that.”
they followed up with:
> “linux isn’t perfect, but we can’t ignore that windows just keeps getting worse while linux keeps getting better.
from my perspective it’s just too late, microsoft has done this too many times, i’ve already ordered my parents 2 macbook neos, will be removing my windows partition this weekend from my main desktop to linux. and moving all work and media stuff to my macbook. i’m just done, so tired of feeling exactly how the podcast hosts described, so sick of feeling like i’m constantly on the defensive with windows.
so from my perspective, no microsoft, i will not give you applause for “look at us! we’re working on local only accounts.” you yanked them away, you made them nearly impossible. you actively patched the methods we were using, now you want applause?
I'm curious because Mac OS effectively has the same model. You can use local accounts but it's highly discouraged through dark patterns and selected features of the OS don't work correctly.
i didn’t have that issue at all when installing with a local account on my macbook? [0]
but even if i had, like i said it is definitely not just the local account issue. it’s so many things just piled up on top of each other. it’s become aggressive. from the nonstop pestering to use onedrive to edge, to microsoft reverting settings i’ve changed after os updates, to ads on my computer to copilot ridiculousness to recall awfulness and on and on and on. and yes, ms actively removing local accounts.
mspaint now tries to push for a login… yep that’s right, mspaint…
[0] when i setup my MacBook pro last month i didn’t have to sign in to appleid at all. it asked but there was a “setup later” or something and i just skipped right past that. no dark patterns or anything for me.
> It seems like NGOs and IGOs have been pushing for internet restrictions for a long time. There has suddenly been a push for age restrictions allegedly because of abuse material. This happens annually.
we’re seeing some good evidence the most recent pushes were secretly funded and directly written by meta, the corporation. [0][1]
according to the link in there,
> Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her.
and they’ve put as much as 2 billion dollars into it. and yes, that’s billion, with a B.
corporations openai, meta, and google were absolutely backing the push for the age verification bill in california and ohio. [2][3][4]
Reading the original research and stripping away the motives implied by the bot, the data is aligned with another interpretation. Namely that Meta is going with the flow and using the opportunity to push for regulation that impact its interests less, while affecting its competitors more.
The original research is riddled with baked in conclusions, and has not been verified independently. Its also mostly LLM generated.
> and they’ve put as much as 2 billion dollars into it. and yes, that’s billion, with a B.
The original report that cited the $2 billion number was AI generated slop. The $2 billion number wasn't from Meta, it was from Arabella Advisors.
The AI-generated report showed only about $20-30 million in lobbying efforts per year across all lobbying.
Even the Show HN post was full of AI slop, claiming things like "months of research" when the Claude-generated report showed it began a couple days prior.
So please stop repeating this AI generated junk. It dilutes any real story and the obvious falsehoods make it easy for critics to dismiss.
That’s on all lobbying efforts combined. It’s not out of line for a company of that scale that is trying to do things like build data centers and other such activities.
There’s a motte-and-bailey fallacy happening with that “Meta spent $2 billion” report where the $2 billion number is used as a hook but then replaced with a different argument if the other parties are observant enough to see that it’s BS
“a bullet to the heart didn’t kill him. his hearts inability to deflect the bullet killed him.”
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